1. The Field of the Invention
The technical field relates to search engines, and more specifically, to search engines capable of searching for video files and designed to extract detailed information from modern web pages and web applications. The application crawler according to the present invention is significantly different from standard web crawlers in many ways.
2. The Relevant Technology
Standard web crawlers were originally designed for web pages where the bulk of useful information about the page was contained in an HTML text file T. FIG. 1A shows the inadequacies of standard web crawlers today when applied to current web pages. In web pages today, it is increasingly common for the useful information about the page to be contained in a variety of different files, which are all assembled in the browser to create the complete application. Common files that are used in modern web applications include:                Multiple HTML files and framesets        Image files such as GIFs or JPEGs        Javascript, Jscript and VB Script files        Cascading Style Sheet files        XML data files        ActiveX controls or browser plug-ins        Video and audio streams        Flash animations        HTML behaviors        Embedded media players        
In today's modern web applications, it is not uncommon for a single web page to rely on all of these technologies to create the page. Given that, web pages today are no longer simply static documents. In many cases they are fully functioning dynamic applications that maintain complex states and execute sophisticated actions in response to user input or other browser or timer events.
There is a need for an application designed specifically to be able to understand and extract useful information from these modern web applications. As such, its capabilities significantly surpass the capabilities of traditional web crawlers, which are typically only capable of understanding static file types such as HTML, PDF, and the like.